Here’s what’s happening in the world of television for Monday, May 24. All times are Eastern.
Top picks
Black Lightning (The CW, 9 p.m.): The Pierce family has had a really rough go of it this season, and with the penultimate episode of Black Lightning, things seem to have gotten a lot worse. But this is the finale, so there’s no time for reflection. And it turns out that we have not yet seen the last of Jefferson Pierce.
Kyle Fowle will bid farewell to Salim Akil’s electrifying series with one last recap.
Whitstable Pearl (Acorn, 3:01 a.m., series premiere, first two episodes): Kerry Godliman (After Life) stars as a “big-hearted local restaurant owner who… just opened up a detective agency, a dream long delayed by an unplanned pregnancy that left her police career in tatters.” Øystein Karlsen of Lilyhammer brings Julie Wassmer’s novels to the screen. New episodes arrive weekly; look for more on this series next week.
More from TV Club
In Treatment (HBO, 9 p.m. and 9:27 p.m., back-to-back episodes): “Uzo Aduba is a powerhouse performer, as witnessed in her Emmy-winning work on Orange Is The New Black and Mrs. America. The actress has an innate ability to enrapture audiences with an emotive performance. Her new series further allows her to fully occupy the frame and do just that: Aduba leads HBO’s revival of In Treatment, which initially ran for three seasons from 2008 to 2011. This reboot (essentially a fourth season) features Aduba’s Dr. Brooke Taylor as the lead instead of Gabriel Byrne’s Dr. Paul Weston. ” Read the rest of Saloni Gajjar’s pre-air review. New episodes will air every Sunday and Monday.
Regular coverage
Wild cards
The Bleepin’ Robot Chicken Archie Comics Special (Adult Swim, midnight): Josie And The Pussycats star Rachael Leigh Cook returns to the Archieverse as Josie McCoy in a stop-motion special that reunites Cook with co-stars Breckin Meyer, Donald Faison and Robot Chicken co-creator Seth Green; the cast also includes Betty Gilpin, Amy Sedaris, Jason Mantzoukas, Jared Harris, and Katee Sackhoff, among others.
Mad For Each Other (Netflix, 3:01 a.m., series premiere): Two next-door neighbors discover they share a psychiatrist and can’t seem to avoid running into each other in this rom-com K-drama.
Independent Lens, “The Donut King” (PBS, 10 p.m.): Alice Gu’s documentary on donut mogul Ted Ngoy tells the complex story of how the Cambodian refugee built “a multi-million dollar donut empire,” and the triumphs and tribulations that followed.
19 Comments
In other shows, I believe Debris is wrapping up it’s season and possibly existence this week.It’s… a show. I’ve been watching because they do really well at good WTF moments, but the show itself is just not really firing on all cylinders. Major character motivations are hinted at and positioned to be vitally important but never really explained. Things are placed in the foreground as ‘vitally’ important, only to vanish and never be heard from for a few episodes before they suddenly show up in the “previously on…”. I mean, one of the main characters essentially tells her boss at MI6 “Screw you, I’m going rogue, you will get me those files.”…. and they do? And nothing further has been mentioned for a few episodes? And someone supposedly vital to everything and actively being hunted, previously found by a scant few seconds on a security camera just takes off cross country on a solo trip… and isn’t inconvenienced in the slightest?Gods. That show.
Completely agree. I have been hoping it figures itself out and takes off like “Fringe” or “Person of Interest” did after meandering first seasons, but that seems unlikely. Those shows had less generic characters.
It’s probably the character issues killing the show. I mean, one example alone – they made the US lead a cipher, and since then haven’t done anything to explain pretty much anything other than: he’s an Afghanistan vet who shoots up with stuff that he’s given by his handler and is prone to making problematic advances on his partner. That’s pretty much it. Even within the show… Basing an entire two episode story arc around his urgent desire to be back with his partner he’s, I don’t know, in love with or something? Not like they’ve really shown it to be mutual, from our end it’s looked like ‘creepy colleague with boundary issues repeatedly has same’.I really get a sense they’re working a long game, here. Unfortunately they’re just not doing it very well.
I think it would have been a much better show if it had left out pretty much all of the CIA/MI6 stuff for the first season and instead concentrated on building up the world around the debris and the ground team. Let it be mysterious without being yet another giant conspiracy show. The most interesting bits of the show have been the smaller human moments around how the debris is affecting people’s lives. I wanted more of that, and less government lackey time. But there is barely above zero chance that this show gets renewed, so I hope they go out big.
Ditto. I watched the first two episodes and then couldn’t get into it. But I’ll watch the finale. There are still things they do very well.
I was hoping they’d have a chance to wrap things up, but I read an interview with the showrunner stating that the season finale tonight is going to “flip everything you thought you knew” or something like that, but explicitly also stating that the finale does NOT work as anything that gives answers or closure should the series tank.The Debris itself is what’s been drawing me back. They’ve put JUST enough structure around what the pieces do that you can get a sense of an actual technological purpose behind various bits (dimensional portals for travel, teleportation spots that could likely be used for easy cargo load/unload without hatches or just throwing chairs through, etc.) while others are far outside the realm of easy explanation.
I feel like it’s pretty clear that Maddox is working with/for INFLUX, so if that’s what flips everything we know then eh, whatever. Hopefully it’s not that.Yeah, the Debris powers were pretty cool. The rain that turned people into water breathers was especially interesting because that definitely seemed like the kind of thing you might send to a planet to terraform it, which could mean that the crash was intentional. If something like THAT is the big flip, that would be awesome.
Maddox is part of my examples of bad character work. Not on the actor’s behalf, he’s trying, but very much with the scripting.We first get introduced to him as “you know I’m going to have to get my hands dirty”. Bad guy. Then, he’s got a tragic backstory involving his wife possibly crippling his son? Good guy. Oh, he’s a workaholic who’s never there! Bad Guy. Nope, he’s constantly shown (when they are focusing on his homelife) working with his son and not blaming his wife for any of it. Good guy.For the love of all that is holy to scripwriting, just give us a solid character motivation. ANY solid character motivation. Does he think the Debris can ‘cure’ his son? Go back in time and prevent it? SOMETHING, ANYTHING FOR US TO CARE ABOUT FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.
Addendum to above, presuming this was the finale.KILL IT WITH FIREEr. Um.What the hell was that?I’ve been telling my wife the George twist since they got ahold of him and he started sounding all mystic about the debris. I mean, that is the entire Influx THING.The rest. Oh god. I feel like I just watched the spiritual successor to the last fifteen minutes of “The Apple”. I mean, thanks for explaining the injection thing, you’d think it would’ve come up in conversation AT SOME FUCKING POINT WITH THE PARTNER YOU ARE VIOLATING ORDERS WITH. And why the hell would he even be allowed near the stuff ever again? Compromised much?Oh god. Native Americans marching their little pet glowy ball of light down to some weird sparkly Finola clone. That, fine folks, is how this particular world ends – not with a bang, but with a giant middle finger to any sort of resolution.
Oh god that show.*shakes head*What. The.
As soon as John Noble showed up on screen, I immediately knew that we were getting no kind of resolution to anything. You don’t bring that kind of actor in unless you mean to have him around for awhile (unless you’re Legends of Tomorrow, but they have no rules over there).Maddox collecting debris to help his family was honestly a lovely touch and gave me more sympathy for that character than I had all season.I take comfort knowing that it seems like it was going to devolve further into nonsense, so if it doesn’t come back, that’s OK.
Yeah, that Maddox bit was actually the most satisfying emotional beat I think the show’s ever hit. Still, though. How many episodes ago did Finola go rogue? MI6 had some weird face stealing dude (was that the same actor as Mr. I Make Dead People that I don’t think otherwise we’d ever seen before?) and then *poof*. So many unanswered questions that aren’t the kind we should’ve had to ask.
NBC still has four bubble shows that haven’t made the decision to renew or cancel yet: Debris, Manifest, Good Girls and Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist. My guess is that Debris and Manifest are done, Good Girls gets one last season to wrap up the story (Netflix pays for a large part of their budget through a streaming deal) and Zoey gets moved to Peacock.
Manifest just fell off a cliff this season ratings-wise. I was pretty comfortable that it would get a season 4, but I’m not so sure about that now.
I’ll miss Black Lightning. After Crisis last year, it seemed like a waste Black Lightning into the main CWDCU universe and not do anything with it. I believe that there was one reference to The Flash, but that was it. I wonder what the crossover plans would have been if COVID didn’t mess up the plans.
Agreed. Are they moving forward with Painkiller spin-off they’ve spent a bunch of time setting up this season?
We should know in a day or so when The CW announces their new fall schedule though The Green Arrow and Canaries spin-off was in a holding pattern for almost a year before it officially wasn’t picked up. The CW announced that they were expanding to Saturday nights next fall (which is where Dynasty is probably going) so they should have room on their schedule for it. Based on when their seasons are ending, I expect Superman & Lois and Riverdale not to come back until 2022 so there might be some more room on the schedule from that. Edit:Painkiller didn’t get picked up:https://deadline.com/2021/05/powerpuff-tom-swift-status-cw-pilot-our-ladies-of-brooklyn-painkiller-picked-up-dead-1234762992/
Bummer. That article does leave some hope it might be shopped to HBO, but that seems unlikely. Plus, I don’t know how well it would do existing in a vacuum. Otherwise, it’s kind of just a generic action show.
I just didn’t have time to watch all the CW shows so I ducked out on Black Lightning during season 2. Worth going back and watching? I didn’t dislike it but after I fell like 8 eps behind it seemed like too much trouble.